At A couple years ago, we wrote about\u00a0a robot called BALLU from Dennis Hong at UCLA\u2014essentially a blimp with skinny little legs, BALLU made walking easier by taking gravity out of the equation. If your robot doesn\u2019t weigh anything, you don\u2019t have to worry about falling over, right? Inspired in part by BALLU, researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a quadrotor with legs called Aerial-Biped. Designed primarily for entertainment, Aerial-Biped enables \u201ca richer physical expression\u201d by automatically generating walking gaits in sync with its quadrotor body.<\/p>\n
Until someone invents a robot that can moonwalk, you can model a gait that appears normal by simply making sure that the velocity of a foot is zero as long as it\u2019s in contact with the ground. The Aerial-Biped robot learns how to do this through reinforcement learning in a physics simulator, and the policy transfers to the robot well enough that the legs can appear to walk as the quadrotor moves.<\/p>\n
Right now, getting this to work on the real robot involves using motion capture on the drone, so it\u2019s not yet suitable for out-of-lab wandering. The researchers are working on adding more degrees of freedom to both the body and the legs, with the goal of being able to physically imitate the gaits of animated characters.<\/p>\n
For a bit more detail on this project, we spoke with lead author Azumi Maekawa from the University of Tokyo.<\/p>\n